Yeowsers. When it goes down, it goes down fast! I knew it was coming a few months ago so I purchased a spare hard drive to archive/install to.

Took about two and a half hours to recover my apps, data and settings and lost only one of my virtual machines (Windows Vista, for IE9 testing) and a few other Apps that I decided to just reinstall from the App Store, but I’m back up and going with all my old settings even without using Time Machine as my backup source.

Well played, Apple. Well played. Now to use Disk Utility to do a partition copy of my Windows Boot Camp to the new hard drive–we’ll see how that goes 😉

Michael “The Professor” V. and I had a great game of lance vs lance BattleTech at Galaxy Comics tonight. It was an even game with the same mechs vs same mechs are we’ve not played in a while and wanted to get our methods working again.

It was a very close game with him coming in as the victor thanks to some not-so-awesome rolls including a snake-eye consciousness roll on my Atlas. Poop happens, we had a blast!! I set the board up for a nice sized game, we did a drop deployment and ended up on maybe 2 hexes the whole game. SHORT RANGE COMBAT!!!

Now that the awesomeness that is Warhammer 40,000 6th Edition has arrived, I have the opportunity to create unique Eldar fortification terrain counts-as for the Aegis Defense Line, The Imperial Bastion and others. I’ve got a few ideas running through my head (open air curvy structures with transparent plastic ‘force fields’) and have already started work on an Eldar Skyfire Lascannon/Quad Autocannon equivalent for the Eldar Defense Line.

I’ll probably design the Bastion in either SketchUp or Lightwave (or maybe even use this as an excuse to learn Blender!)

I do know that I want: an open-air feel, along with semitransparent plastic force/holo fields.

Here are some works in progress for my Aegis Defense Line, the big cannon is meant to be a counts-as for either the Quad Auto or the Defense Laser — I don’t plan on ever taking more than 1one and it’s got parts for both representative. There will be a bit more in the back, mainly a platform for an Exarch, Warlock or aspect warrior who’s manning the turret.

The whole conversion is from two of the old style support weapons, 4 metal starcannons and the front vane of a Falcon Grav Tank (I have lots of these ones thanks to my Wave Serpents and Fire Prisms)

The walls of the defense line will have clear-plastic force-fields between them and mounted on thin bases for stability.

Allies in normal games. This could either the the most awesome thing ever or what breaks the game entirely. I can’t wait to see how this plays out!

What could this mean?

Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!
Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes…
The dead rising from the grave!
Human sacrifice, eldar and dark eldar living together… mass hysteria!

What this really caters to is those of us with *looks to the right hand menu* many 40k armies and have a different dynamic. As far as GW is concerned it entices newer players to expand out their collections to new armies from the perhaps one they may only have.

Right now all I have left to do is paint the green on the canopies of my 3 Fire Prisms — no more than 30 minutes of work tonight. So I’m counting this as done.

However I started thinking on it and I’ve decided I wanted to paint up an Autarch for the help of reserve rolls. I can’t justify having 6 bare Fire Prisms on the table on an Apocolypse sized game. I’d not be able to use the full “OMG It does WHAT?” 6 combined beam of the SunStorm. If opponents see those 6 tanks hiding the the background, they’ll be primary targets.

Base model count

Remember, I don’t count upgrades other than WYSIWYG weapons (no vehicle upgrades)…except for Mind War on FarSeer as they have to take a required power when I count how much I have. I could push this to 4500 points with wargear & vehicle upgrades quite easily and without wasting points. This count is assuming I finish a 96 point Autarch tonight (Banshee Mask, Power Weapon, Fusion Gun – if that’s the options I use).